


Gotham Central

by DesdemonaKaylose



Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, M/M, meet cute more like meet weird
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-01
Updated: 2015-10-01
Packaged: 2018-04-18 12:57:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4706804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesdemonaKaylose/pseuds/DesdemonaKaylose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Who is leaving overly complicated bombs around the school, and why are they leaving notes specifically for Bruce? How do they even know he's investigating? And why lipstick, of all things?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gotham Central

“And where have you been, Selina?” Bruce inquired, looking up from his still-furiously typing thumbs.

“Helping little freshmen down the stairs,” she replied. “You know how I like to give back to the community.”

Bruce held out one empty palm, returning his attention to the cellphone. Selina regarded the waiting palm with pursed lips for a long moment, long enough that the fingers made an impatient beckoning motion. She sighed, dug out a small curve of plastic out of her purse, and placed it in Bruce’s hand.

“A flip phone,” he said, “really? Are you picking dealer’s pockets now?”

“If I was maybe you’d cut me some slack,” she grumbled, settling cross-legged onto the grass. The little crystal cats on her earrings glittered in the late afternoon sunlight.

“No,” Bruce said. “No exceptions.”

Selina blew out a loud sigh, scanning the thick congestion of students across the football field. “Half these guys won’t come back tomorrow, you know, even if it turns out to be a false alarm. You’d think they’d be used to it by now.”

“Used to living in fear?” Bruce replied. “Used to having their lives under constant threat?”

“Ugh, Bruce, this is _Gotham Central High_ , the last time we went a month without a bomb threat it was summer vacation. It’s never even _substantial._ ”

“Last month,” Bruce reminded her.

Something in Selina’s face hardened. “Right,” she said. “How could I forget.” She shook her head, visibly brushing off the grim reminder. “And what have you been doing about that precisely, oh fearless savior, hmm? Slacking off with your polo buddies?”

“For the last time,” Bruce sighed, “I play lacrosse.”

“Yawn,” she said. “Join the football team if you really want to be popular.”

“If I joined the football team I wouldn’t have time to track down last month’s bomber. Besides,” he added, “the point is not to draw attention to myself. Football players walk under a permanent spotlight.”

Selina made a skeptical noise but pushed no further. Fourth period would be ending soon, and as the sun skimmed lower little by little, the edges of the field wavered with the bodies of impatient students determined to make the long trek home by foot if necessary. Most who stayed didn’t have transport beyond the school bus. It would be a good time for her to investigate the contents of unguarded lockers, if Bruce would just load up in his fancy little car and stop cramping her fun. It was probably another false alarm, and the dog team would be scouring the building for another hour with nothing to show for their efforts.

“Why fourth period?” Bruce said, probably to himself.

“Come again?” Selina said.

Bruce tucked his phone into the beautiful black jacket that was probably made of real silk, staring narrowly up at the palatial shape of the old high school. “If it was only some jaded sophomore looking to get out of a law studies test, why call it in at fourth period? If they had called it in this morning they would have gotten the whole day off. That’s how it usually goes. Something’s not right.”

“Bruce,” Selina said, with a faint note of disapproval.

“Look,” Bruce said, “go home. Forget the lockers, alright?”

Selina looked at him for a long time, the harsh pull of his lips and the tense square of his shoulders. She believed that he thought something dire was about to go down, although she was a bit more skeptical herself. Still. He’d been right enough times. She stood, brushing loose blades of grass from her leggings, and gave him a pointed look. “It’s really not your problem,” she said, for probably the millionth time.

“Of course it’s my problem,” Bruce said.

“You’re seventeen,” she replied, “let the big dumb cops with their big dumb dogs do something useful for once. It’s not your problem.”

He caught her hand as she started to shift away, glanced down at her purse. “The offer’s always open,” he said, for probably the millionth time. “You know that, right?”

“ _Please_ ,” she said, withdrawing her hand in one smooth motion. “Nobody’s gonna pay my way but me.”

She could feel Bruce watching her as she went, his eyes on her back, but the feeling vanished as quickly as it came. That boy didn’t have the time to watch her leave. She knew that well enough. While it was nice enough to count him a friend—in a strange, quiet way—there would always be something more important in his life. From the sidewalk she spared a glance back for the school, with its high decorative towers and its cool gray bricks.

Always something more important.

 

 ♤ ♣ ♧ ♥

 

Bruce slipped up the hill to the school, winding a peculiar circuit of his own devising through the lengthening shadows of the afternoon. It was easier to do this at night, of course, but if one knew where civilians were looking and when, it was easy enough to simply _be_ where they were not looking. Inside the building the winding halls were weirdly silent, scattered with the academic detritus of a school hastily abandoned. Bruce scanned the floor for signs of dogs and then selected the contact _Oracle_ from his recent texts.

_Can you get me the exact wording of the bomb threat?_

He made his way to the main stairwell, still scanning as the faint buzz came through.

 _Doesn’t look like anybody’s filed it yet_  
nvm wait  
found it

The screenshot came through a moment later, standard police issue font in standard police issue form. The call had been logged as _youth, male speaker_. Bruce’s heart burst into a frenzied pace. “Just how good are your boys,” the text read, “do you think they can do it in two hours?”

Bruce closed out his cell. His gut flipped—he had been right, he had known he would be, there was something different in the air that he could feel. Something electric. Something green and insidious in the very lighting of the halls.

Bruce had been cleaning up this school for two years now, grimly determined to make a difference somehow, somewhere. Gotham swam in a sea of fear, each citizen perpetually suspended like a fish in murky water. There were no safe homes, no safe schools, no safe streets. And one day—one particularly awful day, one very very bad day—Bruce had looked up from his own dark stream of fear and seen the fact of it. No one should have to be afraid like that. No one else should ever have to.

He’d talked Alfred into moving him out of the private school. His parents had attended Gotham Central, after all, his parents who had always been so careful to never set themselves too far above the common people, who had gone down deliberately into the masses where their wealthy colleagues never dared venture. Yes, Alfred had said, and you can see how well that turned out for them.

That had been another awful, very bad day. Bruce had hardly spoken to him for quite a while after that. Eventually, Alfred had let himself into his charge’s bedroom, holding a small heavy thing wrapped in a white linen napkin. Master Bruce, he had said, if you are going to be attending the roughest school in the county, might I suggest a very good combination lock.

Bruce had picked up his night job, as Alfred resignedly called it, starting with small things. Bullies. Dealers. Admittedly he’d gotten a bit elaborate with some of the early stuff, trying to take care of the problem without pulling police attention down on himself. He was bound to lose all his freedom of movement the moment Bruce Wayne became a known police collaborator. The specks of gossip he picked up in the halls, the rumors from friends, the unnoticed absences, all gone in a blaze of light on shadow. He had set traps, made promises, weeded bad kids from desperate kids and done what he could for them. Then he had gone bigger: a delicate campaign to out a well-respected pedophile, the medical receipts he’d painstakingly unearthed on Crane, the kidnappings last fall.  He was fairly sure that deputy Gordon tore his hair out each time he received a tip scrawled on a generic white notecard.

Nothing ever felt quite big enough to satisfy him but still, it was something. And then someone had cut the wire on Barbara in the middle of the second act of the summer play.

Bruce shook his head. Time enough to sink into that unpleasant pit after the day was saved. He ran a hand over the bannister of the stairwell, considering. The police squad would begin with the least trafficked areas of the school, the boiler and the basement, and work their way up. A better place to hide a bomb, where no one will trip over it on accident. Obviously the smart thing for a secretive investigator to do would be to start and the top, so to speak, and work their way down to the middle, to meet the police team for maximum ground cover. And yet, the reason why Bruce raced up those steps had very little to do with the logistics of ground coverage. His hand, tucked into his pocket, pressed into the edge of the playing card he carried there. The rest of them—there had been four incidents total—rested in an evidence locker somewhere. Bruce hadn’t stolen this one. This one, out of all of them, had been left specifically for him. Last month, on the floor of the hall, as he quietly let himself out and away from the disposal team.

His gut told him that whoever this joker was, they were not the type to leave their hard work crammed into the corner of a cellar somewhere, when it could be out and admired.

On the third floor Bruce paused in front of a mosaic, the glass dulled with the dirt and oil of a thousand careless fingertips. The school had been a prestigious institution when it had first opened. That had been a long time ago. There was a piece of tape high up on the wall, and as Bruce leaned closer he could see the thinnest string—fishing line—strung out from it. He followed its path to the door of a chemistry classroom, which he gently pushed open. There was a faint _snap_ from the dimness of the room.

Something rolled across the floor, disappeared behind a row of lab tables. Bruce stepped inside, craning for a better look, only to catch a flash over movement along the ceiling. Something clinked at the back of the room, something hit a table with a heavy smack, and Bruce felt the world go inexplicably _green_ , electric, insidious. He turned his head, drawing in a breath that seemed to take forever, and in that moment he felt a burst of terrible cold across his cheek.

An arrow thrummed in the whiteboard just past him, cracks spreading  in a wild force out from its buried tip. There was a tight roll of paper taped around its tale, and Bruce, sucking deep breaths from between his teeth, pulled it off. The letter was written in sparkly purple gel pen.

_Nice try. Wrong floor. xoxoxo_

Bruce pressed one gloved hand to his cheek, feeling the sickly slide of wet leather.

Somebody had just _rube goldberg’d_ him.

 

 ♤ ♣ ♧ ♥

 

Across the long table in the main study, Bruce had laid out everything he had in material evidence. It wasn’t much. He’d had to leave the bomb itself, such as it was, where he had eventually found it. He had left a note for Gordon in the man’s office, explaining what he had done to defuse it and what he had found on the third floor. It had been a very peculiar bomb, another bizarre delicate contraption slowly lowering itself into a reactive liquid depth. He had dusted the thing. No prints.

Now laid out along his table there was one (1) playing card, one (1) handwritten note, two (2) ounces of a granulated explosive material, and one (1) tube of red lipstick.

“You know you _could_ hand those things over to the police,” Alfred observed, setting a flask of Bruce’s personally brewed superglue on the table as well. “They have resources a bit more complicated than a junior chemistry set.”

“And this is a little bit more complicated than a _junior_ chemistry set, Alfred. You should know, you bought it for me.”

 “And I regret that purchase every day. Tell me, what do you think you’re going to _find_?”

“Something the police don’t have the time or the interest to.”

Alfred was silent for a moment, and then, more gently, he said, “I worry that you’re spending too much time on this particular case, Master Bruce. I know that Barbara’s accident was very personal for you—”

“It wasn’t an accident, Alfred. It was deliberate sabotage. The lift wires in the theater were cut through, they didn’t just snap.”

Alfred held up a hand. “Semantics aside, this obsession with a case beyond your abilities or resources is only serving to make you more troubled than ever.”

Bruce swiveled his chair, running a hand through the collapsing mess of his usually tidy hair.

“Trust me,” he said, at last. “Something is different here. I need to do this.”

Alfred stepped back, hands clasped in front of him. “You will, as ever, do what you must.”

 

 ♤ ♣ ♧ ♥

 

After lacrosse practice the following Tuesday, Bruce hitched a ride with a team mate to the mall, where he quietly staked out his usual corner at the edge of the department store with the makeup counter that sold Luscious Laugh (New Formula!) in the miniature tubes. He had very little expectation of catching the buyer in the act of replacing the lost lipstick—it had been lost more than two months before, and even if it _were_ really a lead he was certain he would have discovered something by now. Mostly, he came to think. There was the quiet tension of the school, frozen by memory in his head, and the bright chatter of the mall around him, and the contrast dragged him up somewhere beyond the simplicity of fact and into the realm of hypothesis. The quiet flickering lights of the abandoned school were not the right setting to understand, he felt instinctively. He needed to get beyond that, see a bigger picture.

The glitter gel pen had swatched an exact match to a popular brand at the corner store. It could have been picked up off the floor of the school that very afternoon. No lead there.  Bruce had this feeling that whatever he was looking for, he would have to know it by instinct. There wouldn’t be hard leads, the way there had been with his previous cases. He was going to have to feel his way.

He was wrapped up in this, chewing on the end of his pen, when someone sat down beside him. It was highly irregular for anyone to approach Bruce outside of school—he did his best to project the air of a person who would be very unpleasant to converse with. Bruce snapped his attention up, curious. It was a young man, roughly his own age, dressed in the unremarkable black of the counter workers. He smelled faintly of perfume, a confusing mixture of scents so dissimilar that the overwhelming result was simply evaporating alcohol.

A new employee, Bruce’s memory filled in. started maybe a week before.

“Can I help you?” Bruce asked, neither warmly nor coldly.

“Jason,” the boy said, extending a hand. “My friends call me Jay, or they would if I had any.”

Hesitantly, Bruce accepted the handshake. There was something magnetic about it, as if it was drawn by the laws of nature to perpetuate itself. “That’s very candid of you,” he observed.

Jay smiled. It was nearly as magnetic as his handshake, and perhaps a little too wide for Bruce’s total ease. A little uncanny. “Yannow,” he said, “if you want a makeover you don’t need to lurk over here in the corner. I’m happy to help.”

“Me,” Bruce said, at a loss for anything else to say. “A makeover.”

“Sure,” Jay shrugged. “You’ve been in here three times this week already, watching the counter like some hungry thing with wings. You don’t need to be shy! It’s the twenty first century.”

“I’m afraid you’ve misunderstood,” Bruce said.

Jay winked. Underneath the twisting waves of his hair, a little purple stud in the shape of a skull flashed brightly. “Come on,” he said, “why else would you be here? My boss thinks you’re a stalker, but I think we both know better, don’t we?”

Bruce tapped his pen against his notebook, just once. He would have to be more careful in the future about staking out public places. He should have blended in better, perhaps manufactured some clear signal to indicate his purpose in the area—waiting for a girlfriend, maybe? Some shopping bags would at least make him appear to be a customer pausing in an errand. As it was, he had better defer suspicion from himself before he drew any more attention. Obviously he could construct a new lie, a slow carpool or a shopping family member, but.

But then, this person had just offered him a perfectly simple explanation already, hadn’t he? Much simpler than explaining why no one had ever come to pick him up.

“Well,” Bruce said, putting on the smile he used for school functions, “if you’re certain no one will mind.”

Jay’s eyes glinted, a pale green like the jade of the lion figurines his parents had brought home from China many years ago. He stood, gestured grandly towards the nearest chair, and slipped behind the counter. Bruce took a seat, observing the palettes spread out around him. He’d have to wipe off whatever Jay put on him before he left, or Alfred would ask far too many personal questions. Although Bruce held none of the moralistic reservations that he imagined his classmates would have about the whole enterprise, he did have a sort of sinking worry that he was going to come out of this looking like an actual clown.

“So what’ll it be?” Jay asked, leaning over the display case like a pawnbroker displaying wares.

“You choose,” Bruce said.

Jay tapped his lip with one gloved finger—the department store was chilly, but not _that_ chilly. “Something simple, I’d say, how do you feel about winged eyeliner? Sound good? Swell. What’s your favorite color?”

“Black,” Bruce responded, automatically, and then tried not to be discomfited by the critical and amused expression Jay was giving him.

“Well far be it from me to second guess the customer. I’m going to start with a primer and a foundation, so you just sit tight while we get the boring stuff out of the way.”

Jay took Bruce’s face in one hand, the curve between his thumb and forefinger cupping the line of Bruce’s jaw. The glove was a soft, worn leather, as delicate and pliable as the driving gloves Martha Wayne had left on her vanity ten years ago, kidskin maybe. The gentle pressure lit up nerves from the edge of Bruce’s lips to the shell of his ear. Reflexively, Bruce shut his eyes.

“Hmph,” Jay said, sounding a little slighted. His thumb pressed a shade harder. “Don’t close your eyes _yet_.”

Bruce obliged to open them again, and found Jay leaning in with a considering look on his face. This close, Bruce could see that the boy had painted over his lips in a smooth fleshy shade of something with just a slight shine. The result was distractingly lovely, especially when the corners compressed and drew up in thought. Bruce watched them shift and curl through the entire business of primers and foundations, breaking his study only when Jay delicately swiped the curve of Bruce’s lower eyelid.

“ _This_ is the part where you close your eyes,” Jay informed him, pressing one lid closed with the tip of his index finger.

For a brief moment Bruce experienced a dire urge to draw back, to snap his eyes wide open and get down off that chair as quickly as possible. Something in his guts told him that to close his eyes here and now was as dangerous as anything he had ever done, and Bruce’s gut was nearly always onto something. He peered up, through the one open eye, at Jay’s uncannily wide grin. Logic told him that there was nothing to be afraid of in a place like this, at this time of day, with people like these. Logic was fallible. Logic had nothing to do with the fact of Bruce’s remaining eye closing, his deep exhale, his fingers forcibly dropping their grip on the arms of the chair.

If he left now, he would probably never find out where that feeling had risen from.

Jay made a pleased noise and leaned in closer—Bruce could tell from the faint warmth of breath on his cheek, and the eerie sixth sense of a body close to his own.

“Let me guess,” Jay said, as his brush trailed temporary coolness over Bruce’s lids. “You’re an Aurelius Private kid, probably second generation too.”

“Gotham Central, actually,” Bruce said. “But there are certainly people who would have been happier to see me in Aurelius.”

“Oooh,” Jay said, “a career slummer.”

Bruce controlled the frown that threatened to overtake his face with some serious effort. “I wasn’t terribly interested in the curriculum Aurelius offered,” he said, broadly paraphrasing the argument he had made to Alfred years ago. “And the atmosphere created by the faculty and the student body were less than instructive in forging real life skills in the realm of human interaction.”

“Bunch of coddled snobs, huh?”

“If you were ungenerous about it, you could say so.”

Improbably, Bruce could _feel_ the smile that split Jay’s lips. “Best education money can buy, and it doesn’t even matter because somebody’s going to buy their way into Harvard when they inevitably fail senior year, huh?”

Bruce pursed his lips. “In a word, yes.”

“So you figure,” Jay went on, “if someone’s going to buy my way in someday anyhow, I might as well do something interesting in the meantime?”

“You don’t approve,” Bruce guessed.

“On the contrary!” Jay finished his work with a flourish that Bruce could feel even after it left his skin. “Why _shouldn’t_ you do something interesting with your time? We’ve all got our tickets punched for this crazy train called life, why not climb up on the roof while the skylight is open?”

Bruce grinned despite himself. “I’m sorry,” he said, “am I messing you up?”

“Please,” Jay said, “if I couldn’t put makeup on someone who’s smiling, I’d never make it out of the house.”

Jay shifted his grip on Bruce's chin, tipping it a fraction upwards. The column of Bruce's throat sizzled with exposed, vulnerable nerves, an animal instinct urging him to duck down and protect the vital tubes and veins held there. There was something terribly strange about this boy with his uncannily wide smile. Or perhaps it was only that no one had touched Bruce except in passing for ten years, and his body no longer understood how to respond to it. What a depressing thought. Subjectively speaking, it was impossible to be certain which was the truth.

“How did a guy like you get hired here?” Bruce asked, striking out for bearings. “No offense, but you’re not really a middle aged woman.”

“ _Oh_ ,” Jay said, “I didn’t get _hired!_ I just showed up for work one day and they all assumed HR picked me up over the weekend.”

Bruce let out a theatrical sigh. “If only it were that easy to get a job.”

“I bet it is for a guy like you.”

Bruce said nothing for a moment. “Touché,” he said at last. “And I deserve it, because I’m not even employed.”

“Too busy playing lacrosse, huh?”

“I don’t play _polo_ , I play—” Bruce paused, replayed that last comment. “Oh. Hm. You got it right.”

“I'm switching to eyeliner now,” Jay informed him, graciously ignoring the diversion. "So no fidgeting! Mum's the word till I'm done, hm? I always find this part so _tricky_."

Bruce obliged, settling back into the support of the chair.

"Gotham Central had a bit of a scare just recently, didn't it?" Jay asked, rhetorically Bruce presumed. "But of course, nothing unusual about _that._ There's always some strange little oddity stirring up chaos in the halls there. It's the most dangerous school in the country, you know. I tell you what, I wouldn't want to go back to a private school after living that either."

The liner went on like a streak of electricity, delicate and cold under the sharpness of the artificially cooled air. Bruce took measured shallow breaths, willing down the spike of adrenaline that came with the merest mention of his current case.

"I wonder if someday they'll actually blow it up," Jay mused, voice taking a turn for the slightly breathy. "It's been years of _will they or won't they_. Mulder and Scully ought to just kiss already, if you ask me."

Jay pressed a finger into the compressed edges of Bruce's mouth, where he was struggling not to let a scowl break through.

"Oh, I can see you don't approve," Jay remarked, rubbing the curve of the skin there idly. "But really, who would it hurt?"

"The school is the city," Bruce retorted. "It's a symbol of a future, whatever kind of future it's going to be."

Jay finished up his line, but his left hand lingered, sliding back down to the underside of Bruce's chin before finally disappearing in a ghost of fingertips. “Oh Brucie," he said, "it’s just a _building_. Who cares!”

"The cost alone would-" Bruce paused, listening to the faint click of brushes being set down. "I'm sorry," he said, slowly, "have we met before?"

He opened his eyes to find Jay on the other side of the counter, cheerfully digging through a drawer for something that looked like a perfume sample card. The boy scribbled something onto it, a single curl slipping over his forehead, and then glanced up.

"Here's my number," Jay said, tapping the cap back onto what looked like a glittery gel pen.

Bruce's fingertips went cold.

Jay flicked the card at him, grinned a grin that was as wide and dark as the mouth of an endless cavern. His pale eyes glittered out from between slit lids as he turned and strolled away, twirling a keyfob on the end of a brightly colored lanyard. The bustling afternoon crowd swallowed him whole, and Jay was abruptly gone.

Bruce lifted the card with a shaking hand. Purple. He'd bet it swatched an exact match.

104A, the card read.

A hand settled on his shoulder, nearly startling a shout out of him. "I'm sorry," a woman said, quickly withdrawing her grip. "Was someone helping you?"

Bruce swallowed. "Jay," he answered, touching the powdery arc of his cheek, "Jason was helping me."

The woman frowned, tilting her head. "We don't have any Jasons working here," she said. "Maybe you meant Joe? I think someone must have called him in to fill a shift at the last minute--he's not on the roster but I think I saw him around earlier. Would you like me to go get him?"

Bruce turned over the card, heart racing. "No," he said. The world had taken on an inexplicable greenish tint. "Something tells me you wouldn't have much luck finding him."

 


End file.
